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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dr. Voodoo who wrote (15073)	11/4/2003 1:20:17 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793622

Hi, DV, welcome aboard! The problem the Drug companies have now is that they can talk until they are blue in the face, but they have cut their own throat with the price differences between here and other countries. Something is going to have to give quickly, or they will lose control.

To: Dr. Voodoo who wrote (15073)	11/4/2003 4:46:22 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793622

Cool rant!

To: Dr. Voodoo who wrote (15073)	11/4/2003 4:57:14 AM
From: ig	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793622

"Don't like spending 200-800 million dollars and 5-10 years in clinical trials for a 10% success rate? Tell the FDA you'd like to put what you want in your body.(after you did a thorough google search, of course<ggg>)" Brilliant, through and through. Thank you. ig

To: Dr. Voodoo who wrote (15073)	11/4/2003 8:59:32 AM
From: MSI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793622

Well said. I have a client that is a pharma that develops orphan drugs, as well, and appreciate your POV, especially on the side of "follow the money", where increasing costs in one place reinforces cost increases elsewhere in the system in a vicious spiral. Way back in the day, my father was a doc in a small town where many people had no insurance. The tech was low, service cheap, and most of the pie chart of costs went to the healthcare provider instead of the intermediary legal/hospital/insurance/gov't combine. My dad never turned anyone down even if they couldn't pay, yet made a large income, especially by comparison to docs today. Now we have tech taking up greater portions of healthcare, which is fine, but tremendous inefficiencies accumulate in this permissive, lobbyist-driven environment. My brother worked for a Swiss pharma who insisted he travel 1st class Virgin Air at $5k/trip, when he'd rather fly coach, because "that's how they always do it". And that's just a tip of the iceburg. In Switzerland he discovered their healthcare system is private but with centralized insurance, bringing costs down to 1/3rd of ours. The way to look for solutions is to find places where it actually works, and be suspicious of reports in the media saying how bad other countries' healthcare is. These spiraling costs give us medical PALACES. I had a friend who got emergency heart surgery in London, paying $2500 cost because he was an American. I visited him in a run-down hospital that looked like a MASH unit, spoke to the surgeons who were superbly trained, and he got great care. (the docs all talked about coming to America to practice <g>)